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Most students struggle when learning to program. In this paper we examine two instructional tasks that can be used to introduce programming: tell-and-practice (the typical pedagogical routine of describing some code or function then having students write code to practice what they have learned) and prediction (where students are given code and asked to make predictions about the output before they are told how the code works). Participants were 121 college students with no coding experience. Participants were randomly assigned to one of two parallel training tasks: predict, or tell-and-practice. Participants in the predict condition showed greater learning and better non-cognitive outcomes than those in the tell-and-practice condition. These findings raise a number of questions about the relationship between programming tasks and students' experiences and outcomes in the early stages of learning programming. They also suggest some pedagogical changes to consider, especially in early introductions to programming. • Demonstrate potential effectiveness of using prediction tasks to teach programming. • Novices benefit from predicting code output before learning how the code works. • Students learning from prediction tasks scored higher on the learning assessment. • They also had more positive emotional responses to R and error messages. • They considered the learning activity to be less costly than control group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of this special issue is to examine relationships among context, student engagement, and adjustment. We begin by describing the reasons for the increased popularity of student engagement in research, policy, and practice, and then describe how researchers in the field define and study this construct. Next, we outline some of the issues and challenges around the definitions, measurement, and analytic techniques that have been used in prior research. Finally, we provide a short overview of the papers in this special issue highlighting their theoretical frameworks, methodologies, and analytical techniques by which many of the challenges outlined in this introduction are addressed. The overall findings of these papers come from samples in Finland, Korea, and the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This commentary describes the contribution of each individual paper to our understanding of engagement, as well as evaluating whether together these papers achieve the editor's goal of developing an emerging consensus on the meaning and measurement of this construct. Individually these papers extend our understanding of specific aspects of engagement and contextual effects on engagement in important ways, but together have fallen short of the ambitious goal of bringing the different conceptualizations, measurements, and methods into closer alignment. The commentary concludes with a discussion of three issues that need to be addressed in future research on engagement including: 1) examining the degree of overlap between engagement and self-regulation, 2) more clearly articulating the role of affect in engagement, and 3) describing the crucial role of goals in engagement and learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In my commentary, I discuss the historical origins of the Fredricks et al. 3 dimensions of engagement, provide some critical assessment of the individual papers in this special issue, and lay out the argument for renewed theoretical analysis of the concept of engagement. Specifically, the importance of theoretical work related to the definitions of engagement, dimensionality questions, and origins of, and influences, on engagement are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent studies have analyzed social and dimensional comparisons simultaneously in order to consider their impact on students' academic self-concept (e.g., Chiu, 2012 ). Thereby, social comparisons refer to comparisons with the achievement level of students' classmates, whereas dimensional comparisons comprise comparisons between students' individual achievements across different domains. This paper analyzes whether both achievement comparisons influence students' subject-interest in mathematics and English (as a first foreign language). The analyses are based on N = 1390 German fifth and sixth grade students who participated in the BiKS-8-14 longitudinal study. Using multi-level analyses, results indicate that students' competences influence their mathematical and English subject-interests, demonstrating the typical pattern of social and dimensional comparisons. Further, analyses reveal mediation effects by subject-specific grades and self-concepts. These findings also apply for the development of students' subject-interest from grade 5 to grade 6. Results are discussed with respect to their implications concerning theories of achievement comparisons and interest development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]